(Pic: Erosion 1 and 2 by Ledelle Moe)Exhibition by Ledelle Moe running at Bank Gallery.
Bank Gallery presents Erosion, a solo show by US-based South African artist, Ledelle Moe. On the exhibition will be a single colossal figure constructed in concrete and steel; part of Moe’s current Erosion series. Inspired in part by her recent study of graveyard statuary, the work is a sculptural enquiry into what Moe’s calls the “inflated and deflated” nature of the human form.
In Moe’s work, a sense of vulnerability emerges from behind a formidable display of raw strength. In critiquing the monumental, Moe redefines what it is to be heroic. The huge concrete figures in Moe’s Erosion series are typically presented as ‘fallen’, their former height and grandeur contradicted by their horizontal positioning. Moe’s almost violent treatment of surface concrete over a partially exposed steel armature also speaks to a sense of decay behind a brutal show of strength, giving a sense of both power and powerlessness.
“I see this work as an exploration into the fragility of power and the provisional nature of permanence through natural or man made destruction,” says the artist. “Employing the human and animal form, my work addresses notions of devastation, evoking some unnamed catastrophic rupture. These massive forms are fragments - still and quiet testimonies to a powerful event.”
In writing about Moe’s work, artist and curator Paula Crawford has said, “Moe’s work employs and invokes images of war, loss, and human suffering, the kind that daily cross our television screens and populate our newspapers. The fall of the Twin Towers, the toppled statue of Saddam Hussein, and the dusty explosions in Afghanistan of the giant Buddhas - images of human collapse and disarray. If such pictures as they come into our living rooms and onto our breakfast tables are intangible, vanishing as quickly as they arrive, Moe reissues them as disturbingly material, reified in thousands of pounds of concrete and steel, and blurred by the struggle of their formation.”
Crawford also writes: “In a sense, Moe’s South Africa was a place in which the “real” was collapsing in on itself and the ideal was becoming material truth. She talks about “permanence and impermanence, strength and vulnerability” as constant themes in her work, and makes an explicit connection between iconic strength and the magnitude of its collapse.”
Through memory and imagination, Moe continually reinterprets past experiences in her search for a sense of identity as a South African artist. The historical and cultural context from which Moe’s work stems, is one in which the tensions between power and powerlessness are ever-present.
Ledelle Moe was born in Durban, South Africa in 1971. She studied sculpture at Technikon Natal and graduated in 1993. Active in the local art community, Moe was one of the founding members of the FLAT Gallery, an artist initiative and alternative space in Durban. A travel grant in 1994 took her to the United States where she later earned an MFA in Sculpture from The Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond, Virginia.
She has exhibited in numerous venues including The Kulturhuset in Stockholm, Sweden, the NSA Gallery in Durban, South Africa, The Washington Project for the Arts in Washington, DC, and The American Academy of Arts and Letters in New York City. Projects include large-scale concrete installations at Socrates Park and Pratt Institute in New York City. In 2002, Moe was the recipient of a Joan Mitchell Award and in 2008 received the Kreeger Museum Artist Award.
Recent projects include installations in Salzburg, Austria, Brooklyn, NY, Boston MA, Baltimore MD and Washington DC. Ledelle Moe currently lives and works in Baltimore, Maryland, where she is chairman of the Sculpture Department at the Maryland Institute College of Art. She travels annually to South Africa to work and visit.
Erosion runs until July 11 at Bank Gallery, 217 Florida Rd, Durban. More information on 031 312 6911 or email: info@bankgallery.co.za or visit www.bankgallery.co.za
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